Because screenshots are always interesting, here is a screenshot of the “Character Creation” part of Icefall. This is one of the very first screens new players will see, as they opt to begin a new adventure the first thing to do is decide who they’re going to be. (I deliberately replaced the description text with Latin, don’t want to give away too many plot points at this stage!)

Icefall Character Creation, Nov 30 2009

Note: the “portrait” is currently a giant, upscaled version of the tiles used for the characters ingame. I would love to have larger character portraits, but my artistic skill just isn’t there…. hopefully I will find or convince someone at some point to help out 😀

Class Selection

In Icefall, Class is a much more important choice than Race: Race has a few minor effects on stats, starting location, etc, but Class affects how you will approach the game: how you will defeat monsters and complete quests.

I strongly considered a “class-free” model, where the player starts with a generic character and shapes it over time just by their choices of equipment and ‘specialisations’ (Titan Quest is a good example of this approach), but it made things too complicated, and you don’t gain too much in the approach anyway: in Titan Quest, if you don’t specialise correctly, you’ll end up a sort of “jack-of-all trades” type character who is not good enough at any one thing to get very far. So you may as well make the choice up-front, so that you and the game can work together to give you the type of experience you want. Choose a Ranger? Great, I’m going to give you some ranger-related quests.